I made a WordPress page containing a list of all the fiction I’ve published on this blog. I had to do this by hand, because it appears difficult to get a reasonable list using various WordPress approaches (such as tags). The page I created is hardly a masterpiece of user interface design (I hope to improve it significantly over time), but it’s better than what was there previously.
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I’ve been reading a lot about this recently. I’m not sure why, although some of it is due to looking around for info around when I was coincidentally writing up my Fantasy World Sketch. Some of it is due to just happening to run into the edges of a larger discussion taking place mostly on LiveJournal.
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This evening I was asked a few times about whether or not writing was fun, and why I write. I’m not completely sure about the answers.
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Mozilla Labs recently introduced Bespin, a browser-based fully-featured text editor. I have mixed feelings about this, because I wonder if the time would be better spent working on other things (or improving other editors), but on the other hand I like the idea of a text editor written using languages that web developers can tweak, and being in the browser offers a tremendously rich framework for layout and presentation. I also wonder if it might lead to the kind of semantic “word processing” tool I’ve previously mentioned looking for.

The Onion has done some good pieces on Federer in the past, and recently came up with this picture:

I like it quite a lot, but my enjoyment of it is marred by the last item on the Strong Side.
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I’ve been sick as a dog since New Year’s Eve—not the best way either to greet the new year, or to travel—and my writing has suffered as a result. Despite extending December by five days, I’m still not going to finish the novel plan in time, and don’t feel confident about any major progress in the next few days… so, back to getting half a chapter plan done per day, which should polish off the remaining 6.75 chapter plans by 18 Jan.

Hopefully I’ll feel better by then, too.

Happy New Year!

That’s goals for the year 2009, not two thousand and nine goals, people.

I tend to start the year with a bunch of ambitions and projects—many of which I even accomplish. Some of them for this year follow.
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The following is a graph of different text types, or modes, in the David Foster Wallace story “The Depressed Person”, as published in the M. Evans and Company 2005 hardcover edition, with f representing footnotes, or rather a line of footnotes, T representing the title line (that is, the line “The Depressed Person” on the first page of the story, which is on page 31 of this, meaning the 2005 M. Evans & Co. hardcover published in New York, edition), n representing (a line of) the other text, the text that is neither footnote nor title, and whose representative letter here clearly suggests that the author, meaning the author of this post, who is definitely not David Foster Wallace, that this author grants a certain privilege to text arbitrarily placed “above the line” even though this author is very aware that this (i.e., this privilege) is highly questionable, perhaps in general and especially when dealing with the work of David Foster Wallace, but ultimately was simply unwilling to come up with another letter particularly since this letter, n, would provide an opportunity for the kind of metacommentary that the author (again, not David Foster Wallace) feels is apt when dealing with the author (this time actually meaning David Foster Wallace), the dashes signifying the bottom of the graph, and the numbers read vertically indicating the page number.
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I thought about planning my next novel in November, tying that in with NaNoWriMo, but didn’t commit to it, and hence didn’t get anything done.

So I’m going to try to do it in December instead. I intend the first draft to be sixty thousand words long, and as stated want to plan out every thousand-word section, so the aim is to write one hundred words of planning for each thousand words, or two hundred words of planning per day in December. I’m not going to post those plans, since they’re not intended to be real prose—unlike the microfiction version of my first novel, each section of which was supposed to be passably readable in itself. Next month, then, two hundred words extra per day—which really doesn’t sound like all that much, right?

November is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Last year, I edited the second draft of my novel (mostly) during November, and was happy with how that went. About a month or maybe six weeks ago, a friend mentioned NaNoWriMo and I thought, well, I’m not going to write my next novel during it, but I should do extensive planning.
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In May 2005 David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College. Go read it.

It was with shock and sadness this morning that I read of the death of David Foster Wallace. He was forty-six, and apparently hanged himself.
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(The irony of analyzing a web comic mocking pedants is not lost upon me.)

This Wondermark strip strikes me as funny in theory: set up the provocation of the language nerd, show the language nerd’s newfound determined tolerance, and then show him being overwhelmed by the deliberate transgression that’s just too much. I did find it funny, but this was offset somewhat by the fact that the final “transgression” isn’t one that gets me at all (whereas all of the prior provocations would). I’m not sure I really count as a “language nerd”, but I definitely wince at some of what they provoke him with (notably “irregardless” (sic)). So why did the final offense in this strip not bother me at all—and while I’m at it, why do the others bother me in the first place?
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Today marks ten years since I started doing morning pages. I read The Artist’s Way and decided I should try them. I was struggling with my American Literature Master’s thesis, working to get into the TCD MSc in Multimedia Systems, and quite stressed, particularly in a creative sense, even though I was doing a fair amount of creative work. So I read it, and decided that the morning pages sounded like a good idea, especially for someone who had trouble sticking to any daily routine.
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BoingBoing recently revealed that they ‘unpublished’ posts concerning Violet Blue. This caused quite a lot of commentary and some outrage among those who pay attention to such things, and I think it raises a few interesting points.
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I don’t really know what this is, apart from looking like the start of a fantasy story, but it fell into my head, more or less in one piece, this morning:
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Continuing directly on the theme from the previous entry, author Charles Cumming has written a hypertext work that’s a fiction/Google Maps mashup: The 21 Steps.
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When I read this morning that a Bush aide, Timothy Goeglin, plagiarized part of a column for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, I was perplexed. Is it that hard to write your own opinion on something?
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Since I started this incarnation of my blog (either about two or about one-and-a-third years ago depending on your criteria) I’ve mentioned quite a few projects, and thought it would be worthwhile to look back at them and check their status.
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I’m a little behind schedule for December. I’m still going to try to work on sfmagic.org for this month, moving it over to Python and Pylons, and possibly to PostGreSQL, and moving it to a different server.
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I finished the second draft nine days behind schedule, which in the overall scheme of things isn’t that bad a slip. It turned out to be extremely difficult to maintain a steady approach to the editing, unlike either the micronovel version or the first 35 episodes of AFBH, two projects of similar duration that I completed successfully (and on time) last year.
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